This is a recurring theme in my dreams - I climb a great lush mountain, knowing I have to see what's up top. I encounter 5 large pillars, usually stone, covered in sinewy vines. As I stand at the top I see there are people on the other pillars, who leap off one by one. I leap off too. I can see my body falling as if I'm a winter bird. The grass shines at my below, greener than the oldest sea. When I land the ground presses into my feet like a sponge. This is a photographic interpretation of what it feels like to leap from the pillar.




Austin weather can be searingly hot but lately it's been my favorite kind of weather: hot bright sun with a cold, cold breeze. I know that smell is supposed to be the most evocative scent but for me weather is even more nostalgic. For some reason the breeziness reminds me so deeply of high school, where I didn't have many friends and got by each day by telling myself that college was going to be a magical fun time full of happiness and troubles I could call "challenges" instead of "difficulties." Things were supposed to just be better once I got out of my city.

Of course, college is not some panacea for a lost young person. If anything it can exacerbate the things you want to run away from. Freshman year was a terrible time. I remember trying to be happy. I would go outside when the weather was like this and write and read and try to be a hardworking adult. It felt like I was playing dress-up. Often I was more concerned with looking like a responsible person to total strangers in a coffee shop rather than being a responsible person.

I really associate this weather with trying and hoping and feeling uncertain. Sometimes I get the good side of the coin where I can treat my uncertainty as nothing at all. Other times I feel like I'm forcing myself to hope for a better time because other people seem to be able to do that, so why shouldn't I?

Lately, though, it's been brighter. Which is why I edited the photo like this - light and breezy with some cold undertones but lit up with a warm glow. I think with any kind of hope there's a lot of uncertainty (if you weren't unsure, it would be called an expectation and not hope) but that's what makes the feeling so powerful, and for me, nostalgic. This is a new year, I've just turned twenty. I'll have something new to worry and think about - an entirely new decade. But instead of simply wishing like I did in high school, and in my freshman year, I've also drawn up a list of things I want to accomplish. I don't think I'll finish all of them, but I deliberately overshot so I'd feel more internal pressure. I'm excited. This list is like a tangible piece of the weather - warm, and so inviting.


A few days ago I went to Houston with my boyfriend and we went to a family friend's daughter's birthday party. Darling Hayley turned 2! She's the most well-behaved toddler I've ever met - I shot a photo of her when she was around one and a half and the entire time she was so serene and composed.

The party was duck-themed! Little ducky toys, giant fat ducky inflatables, and even tiny little ducky candies. So cute. The boys seemed to love the whole theme as well. Everybody was fed hamburgers and delicious summer fare as the kids had fun by the poolside.




Isn't the table setting gorgeous? The punch was a mix of delicious rainbow sherbet and Sprite. I'd actually never had anything like that before, and it was so amazing! Like a fruity float. Also, you see that giant candlestick? They burn it on each birthday until it's melted down to a stub. So amazing! I wish I had something like that growing up!


Happy birthday, Hayley! You're a gorgeous birthday girl.


I wanted to try my hand at making composites of landscapes, and here's the result. I've never done anything like it before, and while difficult, it was definitely a fun challenge. I'm not too sure about the color effects I ended up using, but I did like how the mountains naturally were producing a subtle rainbow tone...at the same time I did want it to look "finished," hence the subtle split toning. This was also my first try at doing fog - I'm not the happiest with how it turned out, as it isn't exactly what I was going for, but it doesn't look bad. I'm just happy the shadows ended up looking accurate! If you try doing this too, definitely remember to add shadows to added objects.


The post processing on this image after I created the composition wasn't too much, despite what you see here. I popped the tiniest bit of contrast using curves, and the rest I used dodge and burn layers for a more precise contrast control. You can do this by creating a new layer of 50% gray, painting dodge on it with white and burn on it with black, and setting the layer to soft light or overlay depending on which looks nicer.

After the contrast adjustments, I created a new layer set to Color and painted on the mountains using pinkish purple, teal, and yellow, to bring out the fantastical rainbow colors that are already there. Real simple stuff. Then, to give the whole thing a bit of an aged quality - that look that is somehow warm and desaturated but also so colorful - I added a gradient map with a dark dark purple in the shadows and a gold in the midtones and highlights. I set the opacity to something quite low. For a final touch, I unsharped masked using a large radius and then a smaller one to bring out larger and smaller details respectively in the image.

Here's the composite before any sort of editing:


As you can see I also used the warp tool to shrink the woman a little bit, as I felt she was proportionally too large for this image to seem realistic (not that total realism is my goal - but images do have to make sense even in the imagination!). I'd love to try this with a portrait sometime. If you have a portrait of yourself you'd like to be manipulated like this, feel free to send it to me!


I tried something new today. Textures! Except this happened, by accident, when I was trying to produce the second image. I love happy accidents.



This really couldn't have been easier. I took a very bland photo of me against a white wall (no nice lighting equipment, just had all of my window shades pointed upwards for diffused natural light), and made it high-contrast in Photoshop. Then I found an image of a nebula with a lot of textures and bright, visible stars, made that very contrasty too, and set it to overlay. It produced something vaguely like the image below. I liked it, but wanted just a bit more nebula goodness, so I duplicated that layer, rotated it (so I wouldn't repeat images), and repositioned until I liked it. From there, I selectively dodged the portrait photo to blend my face  into the background, or reduce the darkness produced with two overlay layers. You can see I added diamondy stars on the bottom for variety (hand drew them with the brush). Really easy peasy, guys!

The above photo happened when I set the second nebula layer to (I think screen) instead of overlay. Looked really cool and because the edge of my face was blown out from making it so contrasty, it actually smoothly blended in with the stars. I liked that, so I saved the "mistake" image separately and went back later with the healing tool to blend things in. The great thing about an image with lots of fuzzy abstract soft shapes is that you can set the healing tool to something very large, and it'll blend the two sides together in a natural sort of way. You can't do that on a normal photo because the sample size is too big and you'll have a giant splotch falling out of my face. Here, giant splotches are exactly what the image was. It worked nicely!



I've never ever drawn anything in Photoshop before, but my recent interest in images that look like a cross between a painting and a photograph motivated me to try it out a few days ago. You know how you can make a whale when you text somebody by pressing Enter several times and then writing .__.? I showed that to my brother and he thought it was hilarious. His laughter was so adorable that I wanted to make an image of the two of us together, being whales.

"An Evening of Whaling Around"



I wanted some bibimbap...a really delicious Korean dish that's chock-full of fresh veggies. I didn't have too many of the legit ingredients so I had to sub in with sliced celery and broccoli. Which is no problem, since I like broccoli more than the other ingredients that sometimes get put in bibimbap. Still didn't taste as amazing as the legitimate version though. It's strange how sometimes a dish composed of ingredients that you half-like tastes better than the same dish with your favorite ingredients subbed in. Either way, this wasn't bad on a stock.

Plus, my boyfriend actually tried to eat some of his vegetables! Perhaps it was because he saw how much effort (really...not much) I put into arranging the ingredients. He did give up halfway through and exchanged his broccoli for my carrots though. Sigh. Small steps. This isn't a bad dish to give to somebody who you're trying to encourage to eat more veggies. They're chopped up nice and small, come in non-threatening little piles, and look bright and fresh.



Also, I remembered how important it is to upload your photos in sRGB! Always remember to convert the color profile before you upload (that's in either the edit or image drop down window...you'll see something near the bottom that says "Convert to profile"). Select Working sRGB. If you leave it in Adobe RGB, you'll get a really dull image...and sometimes that dullness can look very different from website to website! I had uploaded these images earlier without converting and the veggies looked kind of blue and lifeless.


Powered by Blogger.